Searching for Silver Lake: the radical neighborhood that changed gay America

We are driving up an almost vertical hill in a hip Los Angeles neighborhood, looking for one of the birthplaces of the gay civil rights movement. At the wheel is Roland Palencia, a gay activist who has lived and organized here for decades.

The Silver Lake Reservoir shines behind us, the hills around it crowded with bungalows. Silver Lake was once a Bohemian retreat, a neighborhood for artists and activists, and even, in the 40s and 50s, Communist party members. Now it’s impossible to buy the tiniest shack here for less than a million dollars.

The road dead ends at the bottom of a steep flight of concrete stairs. Immediately, it’s clear there is a problem.

“Where is the plaque?” Palencia asks. “The plaque was right here.”

The plaque in question commemorates the Mattachine Society, one of the first US “homophile” groups to openly advocate for acceptance. Palencia rolls down the car window and asks a man in Spanish if he knows where the sign has gone. Another man emerges and confirms that we’re in the right place. He pokes into the bushes by the stairs. Nothing.

“It’s erasure. Erasure of our history,” Palencia says. “This is where it all began, at least in modern times.”

We have been spending the afternoon touring some of the landmarks of queer organizing in Los Angeles, and seeing how well they are surviving the intense gentrification of Silver Lake. Today, the neighborhood is better known as a place to sip artisan coffee at farm-to-table cafes or buy an $18 smoothie at the influencerapproved Erewhon grocery store.

But over the past 70 years, these few miles around a palm-lined stretch of Sunset Boulevard have seen repeated key events in LGBTQ+ history. We were standing on the hill where the Mattachine Society was founded in 1950, and began to advocate for homosexuals not as sinners or perverts, but as an oppressed minority who deserved rights. Less than two miles away is the Black Cat Tavern, the site of one of the first public gay rights demonstrations, in 1967, protesting the Los Angeles police department’s brutal New Year’s Eve raid. By the 80s, Silver Lake was a center of queer life, especially queer Latino life, and, Palencia says, nearly every other storefront was a gay or lesbian bar, a leather store, a bookstore, or a community Aids organization.

“That’s pretty much gone,” Palencia says, though queer and Latino people still live in the neighborhood. Today, despite the rainbow flags flying along Sunset Boulevard, Silver Lake is being “de-gayed and de-Latinized”.

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Our queer history tour began at Silver Lake’s most famous gay landmark: the Black Cat Tavern. The protest outside the Black Cat took place in 1967, two years before New York’s Stonewall riot, which is often described as the foundational event of the US gay rights movement. Under new ownership, the historic bar is now a gastropub, currently operating in the shadow of a giant Shake Shack.

For Pride month, the fast food outlet was advertising 50-cent rainbow sprinkles, with proceeds donated to a LGBTQ+ organization. “Oh my God,” Palencia said.

A plaque outside the bar describes